>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman joined by John Troyer and we're at VMworld 2017. This is SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. The show's hashtag is #VMworld. There's also a lot of sub-hashtags, so if I was going to make this one the VMworld three word, it's developers, developers, developers. Happy to bring onto the program first time guest Byron Schaller, who is the DevOp's practice lead at RoundTower and Rebecca Fitzhugh, who's Technical Marketing Engineer at Rubrik. Thank you both so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Alright, Byron, I want to start with you. Both of you I've known through the community for a bunch of years but tell ya, how long have you called yourself a developer and, you know, tell us a little bit about what you do these days. >> These days I'm more of a friend to developers, I think, than an actual real developer myself but I started writing code professionally 20 years ago. I've been, kind of in an Ops role, and went back into Dev, and now try to help really bridge that gap and get Ops folks to write better code, and get Dev folks to have some more sympathy and empathy I guess for the Ops side as well. Try to get them to play nice together. >> Yep, but Byron, those of us who haven't been in tech in a while, last time I was coding we called it programming. (Byron laughing) So, I thought that shift happened like 15 years ago. But, Rebecca, tell us a little bit about your background, how you fit into the DevOps community. >> So I would say I am more of Dev adjacent. So I work in Technical Marketing as an Engineer at Rubrik, so while I do write some code and help with some of the integrations, I'm primarily public facing and helping evangelize our software, and work hand-in-hand with the developers as well. >> Absolutely, and maybe talk a little bit about that, you know, we know the Virtualization community, what's different about the developer community, and DevOps versus kind of the traditional administrators? >> One of the things that I've noticed that, in my opinion, is the difference between the events, like comparing VMworld to a DevOpsDay. VMworld is very technically focused, a lot of time. And when I go to DevOpsDays, I always notice they make an effort to show sessions on culture, and to talk a lot about culture of development, and what we can do better as a community. >> What's the connection here, between VMworld and the developer community, right? We're the VMworld has been, I dunno, how many VMworld's have there been Stu? We've been, there's been 15 of them or something? At least. So, very operationally focused, IT people who call themselves IT, operators maybe, even broader than that, Enterprise Architects, and now, we've been talking about DevOps for a few years. So, maybe, Byron, what's the relationship of DevOps to the VMware community? >> It really comes down to the API integration. And at what point do you stops being an Ops person if you're writing a bunch of API code, and you become a developer. That's become a lot fuzzier lately. >> Are you saying Ops people have to become developers? >> They don't have to, but a lot of them are going that way. There's API explorers now that make it really easy to write rest calls and things like that to kick off jobs, and it just makes their lives easier to adopt that trend. It's not that they have to, but if they want to, it's definitely there and moreso than it ever has been. >> Yeah, I definitely think that we're seeing more and more large enterprises, Microsoft, VMware and so on, moving away from kind of this proprietary model, and more into an open model where they want their APIs to be consumed, they want you to help improve their product, and they want you to write code that integrates with their software. >> I have another question about DevOps, right? So, developer plus operations, and breaking down that wall. Can you do DevOps if you don't Dev, right? There are IT shops that just consume packaged software, and they run them, and they do things in the cloud, and they do everything else, but that particular company doesn't make bespoke software, at least they don't think they do. So, can you do DevOps without Dev? >> No. >> Okay. >> So, it really comes down to the fact of most everyone writes code whether they think they do or not. They may not write core business apps, but they could write a lot of other integrations, or they have off-the-shelf software that they write customized reports for, whatever, but there is something going on, something is being created. And as long as you have that thing being created, you can have a DevOps model. But I think it's a lot broader than just in-house applications at this point. >> I mean even if you were writing a script, you're writing code, right? If you're creating Power Serialized scripts or PowerShell scripts to automate something in your environment, that's code. And that would absolutely fall into that DevOps mindset. >> Speaking of the show itself, I know a couple of years ago they had a little breakout with keynotes, and they've done some sessions, my understanding there isn't a dedicated developer track or mini Dev show inside of it. So what do the developers or people do in DevOps, what's attractive to them here at the show? >> There's always the hallway track, right? And then there's the side events like the vBrownBag, things like that where you see a lot people talking about Ansible and other things like that, that you won't see on the show floor itself. And I think with the hackathon tonight, and lots of stuff like that, there's a lot of adjacent activities that are very much worthwhile. >> You mentioned the hackathon, you participated last year, if I remember right, you won, your team won the hackathon. So, tell us a little bit about that experience, this is the third year they're doing it, so-- >> It was great, I mean it was just nice to see a lot of folks in the community come together to build interesting things out of nothing, in like three hours, and that's, doing that itself is just really kind of amazing to me, but then those projects, a lot of them have carried on and gotten adoption, and now there's going to be some things created long term, because of this one interaction. I think that's just really special. >> When I've loved to see the difference between last year and this years, I felt, while last year was amazing, and seeing the people write these scripts and these codes, it felt like it was a lot of shooting from the hip, and what I've noticed this year is that there's been a lot of pre-work done by these teams, these groups, that they've been talking and communicating for weeks, planning what they're going to code tonight. That's very exciting. >> The code program Code by VMware, I think they call it, it actually is expanding, they're doing a lot to touch both developers and kind of the API side of the IT, more traditional IT side. Rebecca, one way to characterize DevOps, or one element is I say part of DevOps would be time to value, right? Rapid time to value, we don't plan for a year, sit in a war room, and like hope we don't lose our jobs when we push the button to launch, you know, the next generation of whatever we're about to launch, right? We've recognized that's a hard way to go about launching something, so instead, we're more iterative, smaller bites, faster time to value. As you go out and talk with IT pros, like again, your commercial side, right? You have a product that has fast time to value, I mean, how much of a mindshift is having to happen inside IT where you can go, "Oh no, I could set this up in an afternoon, "and maybe I could write some code around it "over the next couple weeks," rather than, "I got to plan this out for a year "before I do anything." >> Yes, I mean I think we're definitely moving from kind of a bureaucratic type of development to more of an agile, where we have to iterate, and so, like in my experience, prior to joining Rubrik, I was very involved with VMware and did lots of virtualization stuff, and you would have like one major release a year. Right, and then a couple of updates, and there's a lot of planning that would go into it, and involved, and that gave a lot of lead time. And now, like working with Rubrik, we're on like a quarterly release cycle, and so we're just constantly, so I think a lot of its mindset. So, I don't want to say it's shooting from the hip because it's not, but it's just adapting and moving forward, and then getting ready for the next thing. There's not time to question and plan, it's we're doing this, and let's do it now. >> The thing I'd noticed is just in conversations and in the keynote, APIs were brought up more this year than I remember in previous years, you know you brought up the VMware Code Team, they've been doing the flings now for a couple years, so even if it might not be developer centric, it seems like they're adopting some of the things that you know, are attractive to what the developer community would do. >> Yeah, and there's a lot of really good marketing going on there too, especially around flings. Flings are great, and there are so many useful tools there, that people just don't know about until they get the press, and now that they're talking about it, there's a really great community built up around it, especially with VMware Code, I think is a great initiative, there's an awesome Slack channel that they have, and just getting the word out, more than word of mouth, and getting that stuff in the keynotes is so key to helping reach everybody else who's not already there. Word of mouth only goes so far when you have like the CEOs getting up there and talking about this as a core initiative, that's really important, we need to see more of that. >> Anything specific around the flings you could highlight, like you know, this one was really cool and it turned into something, or? >> The HTML5 client was a fling forever, and it was so much better than the actual web client. >> And now it's becoming the actual official supported client, and the older client is going away, finally. >> Yeah. >> Everyone's happy about that. >> It's very, there's stats feeder, is a super cool one that not many people know about but you can get all this information out of your vCenter, pump it into some kind of like noSQL database, and make these really creative reports, that just, there wasn't a way to do that before that existed, and something like that's really cool. >> Byron, as you go out and talk to IT pros and IT departments, you're trying to be a trusted adviser, you're bringing along a team from your company, are there elements of cultural change or kind of adaptability that when you go into a conference room and start giving your first presentations, and the questions that get asked, do you sometimes you go, what are the signs that you're going to go, "Oh this is going to go well," versus "Hoo boy, these folks are not ready yet." >> So we try to ask some probing questions to kind of pick a fight to be totally, not really pick a fight, but see who's going to take the bait, right? And then how communication resolves itself. And seeing that pattern happen, you know, okay, there's something missing or something as far as how the team constructed that leads to this animosity, right? Find that out as fast as possible, and then find a way to remediate that, is how you get that cultural change. But until you actually see it organically, it's hard to say well you know, just be more empathetic and hug it out, that all sounds nice, but you've got to really find what the dynamic is that's causing the tension or breakdown. >> John: Are there any particular signs that you could point to-- >> Yelling is a good one. (laughing) >> On a positive sign or a negative sign? >> Both sometimes. >> That group's not invited to this meeting, right? >> It's just a lot of finger pointing, it's a lot of you can tell they don't talk. And a lot of it starts with just having a conversation on a daily basis of what do you do, what's your job, how can I understand that, have that empathy, cause until you have that empathy, no one's going to care. And once you build up that, and get this understanding that, "Oh, what you do is valuable to the business as well," then people start to actually, you know, work, or I dunno, be friends or something at work, I don't know, it's really important to build that up. >> Byron, your title has DevOps in it, because you're addressing a function, but should there be people inside IT groups with a DevOps in their title, if you're here at VMware, and you're kind of coding, and you're a little bit interested in that, should you be looking for something, a title of DevOps? >> I think anybody can do DevOps. And I think that's something that we need to change our mindset on. I hear a lot of people say, "Why would I join the VMware Code community, "I don't write code," and it's, anybody can write code. It doesn't have to be the most beautiful elegant code in the world, you just creating a script, you've done it. Now contribute. Put your work on Github, let other people use it. You consume from other people, it's a community of sharing, share. >> That's great. >> It's all about contribution, right? It doesn't have to be code, you can write documentation, you can work on bug reports, there's so many things you can do that are not code related, that people can give back with. That's the important thing there. >> Reminds me a lot of just some of the discussion we've been having about community in general for a while. Rebecca, we're here at a big show, 20,000 plus people, do you spend all your time at meet-ups though, how do you deal with reaching kind of a broad community, or is it kind of smaller, more intimate things? >> I try and balance both, because I have obviously work obligations and I have speaking obligations, and then, but I do try and spend time one-on-one with people as well as at group functions, so I personally like to get out of my comfort zone, so like that was one of the big reasons I attend certain events, like the hackathon last year. My code is rudimentary. I don't want to pretend like I'm some amazing developer, but that was me getting out of my comfort zone and interacting with that community, because I knew that was a community I wanted to be more a part of. >> I guess the question is too, from like, your marketing role-- >> Mm-hmm. >> Do you have to go reach out to those thousands of meet-ups or, you know, how do you balance that kind of small versus large? >> So, yeah, I think like in a large group it becomes sort of an echo chamber in a way, where it's more of you talking at them than talking with them. I personally prefer to be in smaller type sessions, as well as one-on-one type discussions. I think we get more out of it that way. >> You mentioned DevOpsDays, that's a group independently organized, all over the world, kind of a meet-up user group on steroids all day, you've been to some of those as you said and that-- >> Yes, so one of the things I noticed from DevOpsDays that's different than a lot of user groups, is that a lot of user groups will jam pack the schedule, and you might have a 15 minute break there, and you have lunch, and that's it. Maybe a social hour afterwards. DevOpsDays, a lot of them create free spaces, of an hour, two hours, and sometimes, I think the one, I'm attending one in Detroit, in September, and I was looking at the schedule, and I think there's a three hour block of just talk to people, go and find your little community of people, talk to them, spend time with them, and then move onto another community and get to know each other. >> Byron, anything in open source community, and how it is different than, a little bit maybe, than this one here? >> The V community, if you want to call it that, it has been built up, is very unique, from an enterprise software standpoint, no other enterprise software company has what VMware has with that. It is a lot like the open source community, you go to something like OzCon or something, there's the same kind of interactions, the same kind of feel that we have here. >> John: Helping each other. >> Yes, I mean it's all about reaching out saying, "I don't know how to do this, someone help!" And, people saying, "Okay, this worked for me. "This hasn't." And just that feedback loop, and once you pay that forward to five more people, that's just really really great. You see it with the hang space here, the community, the sessions and things here, there are just so many people that want to volunteer and give back, there's not enough time to hear them all speak. And that's awesome. >> That's why we have things like vBrownBag. >> Yeah, right. >> Contribute there. >> There's so many different aspects of what's going on at the show, I'm curious if you have any, if you were talking to VMware and say, "Hey, next year, VMworld, you know, you should do this." Anything you'd like to add? >> Hmm. That's a really good question. >> That is a very good question. >> I mean firstly I'd love to see more developer track type items, especially as VMware is moving towards more consumable APIs in their platform, so I'd like to see more in that realm. >> Yeah, there could always be more work around that. I think I'd like to see more interaction, from the VMware Devs themselves. Talking about stuff going on, inside VMware, as much as they can I guess. That'd be super interesting, you don't see a lot of behind the curtains stuff here. And I think that'd be neat to see more of that. >> Yeah, I always love to look at the kind of similarities and differences between those communities. We do, we've done Red Hat Summit for a number of years, I'm going to be at the Open Source Summit, you know, coming up soon, we're at Amazon re:Invent, where the enterprise folks and the developers always argue about which keynote for them versus the other person, and striking that balance is always tough. Well, Byron, Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us here, really appreciate your insights onto what's happening in the community, and thanks for all you're doing there. For John Troyer, and I'm Stu Miniman, we've got lots more coverage here in three days of theCUBE at VMworld 2017. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)